Does Your Voice Tell Your Story?

Are you a:

• coach
• speaker
• consultant
• teacher
• teleclass leader

If yes, you'll want to meet Katherine Scott. Katherine is a voice coach who helps people realize the true strength, the true authenticity, of their voice.

Katherine has created a five-week teleclass series, and I'm happy to announce that she'll be teaching it through Passion For Business. The teleclass begins June 5.

In this 5-week teleclass you will:

• Understand the importance of your voice and how it affects every level of your communication.


• Tap into the real source of your power and reflect that power in your voice.


• Discover how the knowledge of the four stages of learning will help you reclaim missing aspects of your voice.


• Learn how to be effective on the phone with no facial expression or body language.


• Recognize why your emotions affect your voice and how to work with them, not against them.

Organizing for the Self-Employed

Last week, we had special guest Jamie Novak on our free monthly teleclass, giving us great tips to Get Organized Today!

Jamie helped us with:

• Time management


• Messy desks


• Piles of paper and filing


• Managing email

Who's Minding The Store?

After I got out of the hot tub at 8:30 the other night, I noticed the water level was a little low. Since the hot tub is on the patio, it's easy to refill right from the outside hose. So I dutifully trotted over to the hose, dragged it to the hot tub, and started topping it up. It takes a long time for the hot tub to fill, so I left it running and went inside to watch an old movie.

At 10:30 PM, I poked my head outside to call the cat for its dinner. Yikes! The hot tub was over-flowing!

So there I was in my soaking-wet pajamas, bucket in hand, bailing out the hot tub at 10:30 on a cool Spring evening. All I can say is thank goodness I live in the countryside; the only ones laughing at my escapades were the skunks and the possums.

I find when I do something really, really stupid, it often has a bigger message. After I dried myself off, I asked myself, "What is this trying to tell me?"

The pattern I found, not just for myself but for a surprisingly large percentage of my clients that week, was that we were all ignoring the basic watch-dogging that needs to happen when you run a business. Things like balancing checkbooks, looking at monthly profit-and-loss statements, reviewing website statistics, planning for marketing campaigns – we were too busy with what was happening "in the moment" to pay attention to business basics.

There's nothing wrong with being present in the moment. In fact, it's quite enjoyable to be full present and conscious to what you are doing. As a small business owner, you also need to be paying attention to the future, while simultaneously looking at the bottom line statistics that tell you how you are doing. It's a lot of hats to juggle, but NOT paying attention to all these details can be fatal to your business.

So what's a business owner to do? Find some way to remind yourself of upcoming events and monthly tracking. I created a two-fold system for myself. First, I put a monthly recurring appointment in my Outlook calendar to look at my finances and statistics. Second, I write out all the steps to a project, from concept creation to marketing, and keep that checklist handy so that bits of the project don't get lost in the zeal of creation. I also share this project plan with my assistant so that she can help keep me on track.

Don't wait until you spring a leak to discover that you aren't paying attention to all the details. Write them down and refer to your list often so that you can stay on top of things.

And never leave a hose running into a hot tub. It's a sure-fire setup to a night of bailing out water!

The Green Home Office: Duplex Printing

This weekend I purchased a duplex laser printer for my office (HP LaserJet 2015dn). All I can say is, "Wow! Why didn't I do this sooner?"

How many times have you printed an article from the internet, one side of the page printed, one side of the page blank? Or printed online receipts? Or printed handouts? Or printed marketing text you were working on?

Each time I printed with one blank side, I was wasting paper. I tallied up my use of printer paper from the last 12 months, and I used a whopping 35 reams (17,500 sheets of paper)! While most of it went into the recycling bin, that's still a huge amount of paper for a home office.

Now everything I print, from website pages to student guides, comes out double-sided. In fact I have the printer set to be double-sided by default, which means I manually have to change the settings if I want something printed single-sided.

The "d" in the HP LaserJet 2015dn stands for "duplex;" the "n" stands for "network-ready." My husband has set up the printer to be usable over our wireless network (thanks, honey!). This means that we can share the printers instead of each of us purchasing our own laser and color printers. By having a wireless printer on the network, I can sit on the patio with my laptop and wireless connection, and print directly to my office printer without leaving the patio. Along with my wireless telephone headset and wireless internet connection, I have the ultimate wireless office.

Another great tree-saving tip: When I want to save an article I find on the internet, I don't print it to paper. Instead, I print it to a PDF file and store it on my hard drive. All these articles are sorted by topic so I can easily find all my research when I'm getting ready to write an article or student guide. Plus the PDF file allows me to "highlight" phrases that are important (the way you'd use a yellow highlighter pen on paper) and save that highlighting with the PDF file. When I open the file later, the highlighting reminds me about the good information in the file.

Sure, all these things save money and time. But more importantly, they help preserve resources.

I'll be writing more articles about the "green" home office in upcoming blogs.

The Imposter Syndrome

Do you feel like a fake? Are you waiting for the day that someone will discover that all your success was brought about by luck?

You're not alone.

According to this article in Inc. Magazine, as many as 70% of all people feel like a fake at some time. Back in the 1970's, psychologists studied this phenomenon, dubbed "The Imposter Syndrome."

The Imposter Syndrome is divided into three sub-categories:

• Feeling like a fake


• Attributing success to luck


• Discounting and downplaying success

And it isn't just new entrepreneurs that feel this way. According to this article from CalTech, it's the high-achievers and the already-successful who suffer the most. The CalTech article goes on to discuss ways you can overcome your Imposter Feelings.

This topic came up recently at one of my mastermind group meetings. A mastermind participant, a highly-successful and sought-after author and entrepreneur, said she was just waiting for someone to discover that she didn't know anything, really, about her topic because she didn't have a Ph.D. (although she's written three books on the topic, has studied it for over 10 years, has major sponsorship endorsements from large corporations, and an education and product line to go along with the books). Her worst fear: that some interviewer will ask, "Who are YOU to write about this topic??"

In the end analysis, a reality-check is in order. Have you accomplished things because of your intellect, your creativity, your tenacity, your heart? For every failure you've had, haven't you also had an equal success?

Each day, when you catch yourself in the bad habit of moaning about everything that went wrong, reach for "balance" and remind yourself of all the things you did right. And when you have a big success, reward yourself and celebrate this wonderful moment!